Is it time to revise the old saw that everyone in the world is connected by just six degrees of separation? A study from French mobile carrier O2 has found that strangers are more connected to each other than they ever have been.
According to the study, the average person is now connected by just three degrees within a shared “interest” or social group instead of six. In fact, it found that people are usually a part of three main networks: family, friendship, and work.
O2 asked adults across three different age groups — 18-25, 35-45, 55+ — to make contact with random strangers from areas all across the globe using only personal connections. By linking their shared interests, the participants were able to connect to that person in three person-to-person links.
Stanley Milgram originally coined the term “six degrees of separation” in 1967 to show that everyone in the modern world was capable of connecting to another by linking people and interests. But in today’s world of social networking, links between strangers are closer than in Milgram’s day.
According to Jeff Rodrigues, a social networking specialist that carried out the study, 97 percent of the participants said they felt more connected to people today than they ever have in the past and for older respondents, email and mobile phones were the key factors in reducing the degrees of separation. But for those in the younger generation, Facebook was the main factor. Text messaging was also mentioned as an important component in reducing degrees of separation.
“What the study has brought to light is that the way we now interact means it’s never been easier to make connections and build networks of contacts,” Rodrigues said in an interview.
It should be noted that the research is not the epitome of a real scientific study—O2 paid for it, after all. And anyone who has a LinkedIn account knows that it is still easy to find plenty of people who are more than three degrees away from you. But the study does underscore something we all know:more so than ever before, everyone is connected (even if it is only tangentially).
Maybe it is time to revisit Milgram’s study in a more robust way. It could help silence the critics who believe Facebook and the rest are nothing more than places for kids to waste their time. Let’s face it – how often will you find one service or industry that can totally transform the way people are connected?
O2 isn’t French, it’s a European carrier (though not operating at all in France) owned by Telefonica (Spanish).
We’re becoming a global village and it’s nice.
Yes, because we really *know* the folks we post comments on blogs, see on MyFaceSpace(book) and “follow” on Twitter.
This on-going farce that we’re all connected despite still being strangers to one another (but hey, that’s cool!) is really getting old.
@ Nicolas – well that’s true for people who don’t provide any online social detail – we don’t really *know* who anyone is however we can get a better sense of who they are based on their online profile. Take Tim as an example – the fact that Tim provided his full name and a link to his blog let’s you see who he is. He has taken the first steps to social recognition and social credibility and that makes it easier to get to know others. It’s like Mike Arrington – if you bumped into him at a conference would you feel like you kinda know him already?
I think this degrees of separation stuff is pretty cool.
Cheers – Eric
O2 is actually english not french.
very interesting. It seems that social networking (myspace, facebook, etc etc) might significantly change our perceptions.
Three degrees of togetherness.
o2 was once english (or british). it is now owned by Telefonica which is distinctly Spanish
Let the so called pundits say what they like. There is huge value in Facebook data that we could all learn from. Thanks for the post. Referred by : http://www.twitter.com/mpesce
Hmmm 3degrees.com Heh.
Even better: 3 Degrees of Separation – The Movie.
I think O2 is not French!
“In fact, it found that people are usually a part of three main networks: family, friendship, and work.”
Did they really have to do a study to find out that most people have family, friends and work? lol
Hey, I think I know a couple of the commenters!
1stly chrome rocks. secondly no shit sherlock i can believe they actually spent the time on doing a case study to prove that more randoms are actually connected these days derrrrrrrrr O2 more like IE2. peace out
Ernst-Jan Pfauth made the argument just today (http://thenextw...e-with-the-day/) that it is easier and easier to find everybody within three degrees, but that this essentially means that a lot of your links are going to be worthless, because the redundancy is just too much. There’s not much use knowing “you’re connected to this person trough 132,321 other people”, is there?
Sorry, link here.
doesn´t this validate what we all thought social networking is about? nice. and astonishing how one single trend is able to change how people interact and perceive interactions. one little afterthought: these connections are far more cursory than the good old ties… right?
Even if this were a scientific study, it doesn’t invalidate the ’six degrees’ rule at all. You say it in your second paragraph:
“According to the study, the average person is now connected by just three degrees within a shared “interest” or social group instead of six.”
There are plenty of people outside of my shared “interest” and social groups – so someone on the other side of the world who has no interest in hill-walking, rock climbing or web-design, and is not in my family, is almost certainly more than three degrees away.
what people fail to mention when discussing milgram is that this famous study actually boasted a less-than-20-percent success rate….you may want to take a hard look at research performed by members of SOCNET before treading across this subject with wanton disregard for existing research into this area….many others have looked at this particular area of social graphing and tend toward 5 to 7 connections…
While I agree wholeheartedly, that 3 degrees of separation is far too few and that this study most likely lacks adequate, logical scientific backing, I think including members of different groups and assuming separate members within a certain group are connected, then I can comprehend thatthis number trend down from the 5-7 number. What is most often the case in group dynamics though, is that people don’t know one another. Take for instance a company larger than 500 employees, more likely than not, there are members within that “group” that don’t know one another. Then again we can argue that facebook/myspace etc… has led to the degradation of the term “friend” or even “connected”…
Hey guys, if you want to checkout how is people connected and find out how companies can relate to each other you can use my Flash App.
It uses the CrunchBase API data to relate companies and people!
Hope you give it a try! http://www.kill...ps.com/flashapp
Thank you internet!
Some simple mental arithmetic (admittedly a rarity these days!) is enough to trivially disprove this. The maximum number of acquaintances that any human can handle is about 150. (Any tribes larger than this spontaneously split into smaller tribes, pretty well independently of which culture they are in.) So you are one degree away from at most 150 people, two degrees away from at most 22,500 (and remember that many, many of those people – mutual friends – will be counted twice, so the real figure will be significantly lower), and three degrees away from at most three million or so. Less than half the population of London.
I disagree. I have many more than 150 acquaintances. More around 1000 probably.
Social networking is here to stay and its going to be an integral part of our social structure !!!
Pretty cool. Population is getting larger, separation is getting smaller. True many of these people on our social networks we don’t know well. But the point is that you can make a connection if you need to. I think its pretty sweet.
Some pundits are making more of this evidence than it deserves. The three-degrees claims apply to “shared interest networks”. In their press release, O2 says the study “reveals that within a shared ‘interest’ network (i.e. hobbies, sport, music, religion, sexuality etc), the average person is connected by just three degrees.” Not really earth-shattering.
I would agree with the statement that more people are connected by fewer degrees. I’m within a degree of Bill Clinton and countless executives, entertainers, etc. I’m also directly connected to a lot of interesting people as well.
Why did they make the users do the work of connecting to strangers? They could have just looked at the social graph data of the social network, if they had access to it. Would have been a far larger and more accurate data set.
Interesting latest study which actually confirmed six degree separation.
Hey, TechCrunch : it’s time for you to get outside your cubicle to learn about the REAL World. O2 is no french but british, owned by spanish Telefonica. Ever heard of Europe, guys ?…
This is a very biased article indicative of nothing more than that groups (and perhaps by extension ability to find groups through websites) can bring people closer together.
If anything it says more about meetup.com (that’s actually marketing itself as POLAR to social networking) than Face/Space themselves.
Do you know that Orkut and other were there before facebook??
Where is the skepticism that when a company publishes a press release touting some new finding in a ’study,’ the study itself is nowhere to be found? Was it actually published in a peer-reviewed journal? Apparently not. How many people were studied? The press release doesn’t say.
So needless to say, I’m disappointed you guys picked this up 2 weeks later and describe it as something worth reporting on. It’s the worst possible PR tripe.